Clawed: A Gin & Tonic Mystery

by L. A. Kornetsky

  He didn’t have an answer to that.

  * * *

  The school was a large, gray stone building, and the halls echoed the way buildings that are normally filled with people do when they’re empty. It wasn’t that long after 3 p.m., but Ginny thought final exams might have started already, and anyone who didn’t have to be here wouldn’t be.

  Kim was waiting for them in the gymnasium, sitting on the second-to-bottom step of the risers. She was wearing running pants and a tank top with her school’s name on the front, her dark red hair pulled back in a ponytail and her skin flushed, as though she’d just finished a hard workout and cool-down. Ginny was uncomfortably reminded that she’d let her own exercise routine slack off in the past week, and that she wasn’t a teenager anymore.

  “All right, I’m here. What do you want?” Kim was, if possible, even less comfortable talking to them now than she’d been before.

  Ginny looked at Tonica, and he shrugged. They’d discussed their approach, briefly, on the way over. If Ginny’s worries were true, he needed to back off, project his nice-guy-only-here-as-support aura, and not seem even remotely threatening. He might be the people-schmoozer, but she was the one who had talked to the girl before, and odds were she’d open up to a woman more than she would a guy, especially a stranger. The problem was, Ginny had absolutely no clue how to begin. “Did the guy who died touch you in bad places?” was a crappy opener.

  Georgie, obviously recognizing the girl from their previous meeting, came to the rescue, settling herself at Kim’s feet and pressing against her leg with the “please pet me my life will be incomplete if you don’t pet me” expression that nobody could resist. Kim was no exception. She started rubbing George’s ears, and they could see her shoulders ease out of their tight hold.

  They joined her on the bleachers, Tonica on the bench below with Georgie, and Ginny sitting next to the girl, careful to leave enough room that she didn’t feel pressured.

  “Thank you for meeting with us,” she said finally. “I have a few questions I’m hoping that you could help answer?”

  “About Jamie? Mr. Penalta, I mean?”

  “Yes.” Interesting slip, using his first name, but not unexpected, based on what they knew. But it didn’t incriminate, one way or the other: everyone said he spent a lot of time with the neighborhood kids, and in her experience that meant you either went full-on formal to maintain respect, or encouraged informality to improve communications. It didn’t curse or exonerate him, either way.

  Kim stopped petting Georgie for a moment, and then nodded. “Okay, yeah. I figured. What questions?”

  Ginny decided, on the spot, that the only way this was going to work was if they didn’t go in the direction Kim was clearly bracing herself for, if they kept her in her comfort zone and didn’t freak her out. So the obvious questions were out, at least at first.

  “You called him Jamie? Makes sense—not that much older than you, really.” Ginny wasn’t all that much older than the dead man, but she knew that the difference between mid-twenties and early thirties would be huge to a seventeen-year-old.

  “Yeah, I guess. It was . . .” She toyed with the lace of one sneaker, picking at the plastic end. “Stupid. It made us feel older, I guess. Important. Like we were on the same level, or something.”

  Ginny flicked a glance at Tonica, who was frowning, his arms crossed over his chest, and for a minute she saw him the way a teenager might: a large older guy with a military-style haircut, muscled and slightly fierce, with that frown on his face. She widened her eyes at him and shook her head slightly, trying to tell him to ease up a little. He was supposed to be stern, not scary.

  “Being seventeen sucks,” Ginny said in response to the girl’s words, less to Kim directly than a memory of her own, and the girl scoffed bitterly, like Ginny had no idea what she was talking about. “Yeah, it really does. You’re supposed to know everything, what you want, who you are, but nobody lets you actually do anything. And please, don’t tell me ‘it gets better,’ because when? When does it get better?”

  “My mom says around forty,” Ginny said, so dryly that it broke through Kim’s quiet rant, and she looked up in surprise, then laughed—only a little, barely a huff, but it was a real laugh. “Yeah. My mom said that, too. That sucks.”

  “So you thought getting a fake ID would make things better?”

  Kim looked like she was going to deny it, then all the air went out of her, and any defiance with it. “Maybe not better, but different. All my friends were getting into clubs . . . It wasn’t about drinking, we just wanted to dance. And I’m going to college in the fall, and everyone has fake IDs there. . . .”

  “Not everyone,” Tonica said, and when she looked at him he smiled at her, and shrugged, the charm turning on again, if powered down enough that it wasn’t even remotely flirtatious. “I’m a bartender. I check a lot of ID. And we’re pretty good about spotting fakes.”

  “Oh.” Kim looked a little taken aback by that, more than anything else. Ginny hid a smile. She hadn’t been a big drinker when she was a teenager, either, but the lure of being able to go where they weren’t supposed to, to pass as adults . . . she remembered that. She thought, though, that reassuring the girl that there would still be bars she could get into, especially in a college town, wouldn’t be the most responsible thing to say just then.

  “Guess I spent a lot of money for nothing, then. He wasn’t cheap.” Bravado shone on her face, even though she kept her tone even, a little irritated but not too put out. She was good, Ginny would give her that, trying to be an Adult talking to Adults while her body was practically curled over Georgie, asking for reassurance. “But I’d heard from everyone how good his work was, all year, and I’d saved up enough money for my own, finally.”

  Ginny nodded, and let her own hand rest on Georgie’s backside, a nonverbal reminder to the girl that the dog trusted Ginny, and she could, too. “So you got your ID from him, before he died?”

  “Yeah. I’d gone over the week before and had my photo taken, and he’d texted me the day before to say that it was ready.” She looked at Ginny quickly, then dropped her gaze again. “That was the day before he . . . before he died, I guess.”

  “And you went over to pick it up that morning?” That was their guess, that she’d been at least one of the people Sally claimed to have seen on the porch. “Did you go alone?”

  “Yeah. I brought him the cash—he never made you pay up front, just when he delivered—and . . .” She stopped talking and rubbed Georgie’s ears again, frowning at the planked floor of the gym like it held an answer to whatever question she was asking herself. Tonica looked at Ginny and she shook her head slightly. They should wait the girl out, not push her, or ask if anyone else had been there. It was the longest few minutes Ginny could ever remember, waiting to see if the dam would break, or get reinforced.

  “He was always such a nice guy, you know? I mean, he wasn’t creepy-nice. He didn’t give us booze or anything or act weird, he was just . . . nice. He didn’t talk down to us, and he didn’t try to pretend we were anything other than dumb kids, you know what I mean? It was just . . . it was like he remembered what it was like, having everyone shouting at you to figure things out and at the same time telling you that you couldn’t do anything.” Once she started talking, Kim didn’t seem capable of stopping. “So I guess we trusted him?”

  Ginny noted the past tense, and didn’t think it had anything to do with the guy being dead. Damn it, she hadn’t wanted to be right, she really hadn’t. She wanted to look at Tonica, to see what his reaction to that was, but she was afraid to take her attention off Kim, as though that would be an insult or betrayal.

  “So you went over there, alone.”

  “Yeah. That was one of his rules; that any business had to be done solo. He said if you weren’t able to do things on your own, you weren’t old enough to have a fake ID. And I didn�
��t think anything about it, until . . .” She was still petting Georgie, still focused down, but still talking. “Until he’d taken my money, and given me the ID, and then he was up in my face, trying to push me against the wall.” She swallowed audibly, and the hand on Georgie’s head was trembling. “He said it was a bonus, just a little bonus, he said, and his hands were everywhere and I freaked. I totally panicked and forgot everything we’d ever been told about self-defense, or anything. I couldn’t get him off me no matter how hard I shoved, and he just kept talking like it was okay, like I wanted it, and I didn’t.”

  Even without looking, Ginny would tell when Tonica tensed up. She didn’t know much about his childhood, or even his life before he came to Mary’s, but she did know he’d been surrounded by sisters and female cousins, and she knew enough about him to know that right now all he wanted to do was a) beat the dead guy to a pulp and b) comfort Kim, and neither one of those things was going to be useful right now because a) dead guy was dead and b) another guy touching her right now was not going to make it better.

  She was really, really sorry she’d been right, and Tonica had been wrong.

  “Did he—?” She stopped, not able to get the words out of her throat.

  “He got his hands under my shirt, and he was grabbing at me, and he kept talking. And then he tried to give me a hickey. On my neck. It was so gross, I started to cry, and I sneezed on him ’cause my nose runs when I cry, then the doorbell rang and I guess that freaked him out enough that he let go, and I grabbed my stuff and I ran.”

  Ginny let out a sigh of relief. But at the same time, her brain was shuffling the pieces around, trying to make room for this new information. “Kim did he ever . . . Did you ever hear of him trying that on anyone else?” Because if there was one thing you learned it was that creepers rarely creeped on only one person. Especially if their preferred target was teenagers And if they were in a position of having something said teenagers wanted.

  “I don’t know.” She shook her head, but didn’t seem certain. “Maybe? I mean . . . guys like that, it’s not about me, right? That’s what Nancy says, it’s not me that set him off, it’s them?”

  If it wouldn’t have freaked Kim out more, Ginny would have hugged her, and then and found her friend Nancy and hugged her, too. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re a hundred percent right. They . . . But you never heard anything?”

  Kim shook her head, her ponytail swishing gently. “Nancy said we should ask around, but even if he was . . . he was the only source for decent ID, you know? Nobody’d want to hear it. We’d be the ones making the problem, not him.” She swallowed. “And then . . .”

  Oh Christ, there was more?

  “And then you came by, and we found out that he was dead.”

  Ginny inhaled, then nodded slowly. No wonder they’d looked so shocked, and also, yeah, she could see it now, relieved. She’d basically just told them that the monster was dead, that they didn’t have to decide what to do because someone else had taken care of the problem for them.

  Except there was still a monster out there: the guy who’d done it.

  “And you didn’t see anyone else there that morning?”

  “No. Oh, wait.” Kim frowned, and Ginny could see dots connecting in the girl’s head. “When I left, I ran out the front door and there was a woman there. She’d rung the doorbell, I guess, it was all kind of a blur then, and . . . she made him let me go. Or he let me go because she was there?”

  The two people the little girl said she had seen on the porch with Penalta. Kim, and the unknown woman. Ginny felt a stir of excitement, the way she felt when she was this close to figuring out a problem, or cracking a case.

  “Did he know her? Did he mention a name?”

  Kim shook her head, face still down and intent on Georgie’s back. “If he did, I don’t remember. But . . . he was killed just after that, wasn’t he? That’s what they’re saying, that he died mid-morning, and I was there before school, and . . . oh my God, was she the killer? She touched me!” She was shuddering now, her eyes tearing, and from the way she kept sniffling, her nose was probably starting to run, too.

  “Ease up,” Tonica said, his hand gentle on her shoulder. “Breathe out, then in, slowly.”

  Kim shuddered, and Georgie pressed harder against her knee, doggie breath a comforting miasma against her cheek. “Breathing, right.” But she followed his instructions, until she could speak easily again. She glanced at the clock up on the wall, then stared at the wall itself.

  “He was alive when I left, I swear it.” She didn’t look at either one of them, her eyes steady on the wall, her jaw tight. “I was scared, and I was angry, but I didn’t kill him. But if that woman did . . . I’m going to have to go to the cops, aren’t I?”

  That had been their best-case scenario, that Kim raised that option herself, rather than their mentioning it.

  “You probably need to talk to them,” Ginny said, keeping her voice soft. “Don’t worry, they’re not going to think you did it. I saw the body, Kim. I’m pretty sure even if you were in a rage, you couldn’t have done that.”

  She looked at Ginny then, and the confusion on her tear-streaked face solidified Ginny’s thought that Kim couldn’t have murdered the guy; she had no idea how he’d been killed, and hadn’t even thought that the cops might suspect her.

  “Whoever it was, they beat him to death, Kim. They beat him so badly his face was . . . It was ugly.” And that was why she’d assumed the killer as male, to show that kind of rage. . . . If a guy had done that, she’d have been pissed at the assumption that a woman couldn’t kill just as easily as a man. They’d been idiots.

  Ginny shook it off. They had a suspect now, and if they could get a description out of Kim, maybe the cops would have a good chance at catching her.

  But that only solved the cops’ problem, not hers: they still had no idea who had actually hired her—Kim hadn’t, obviously, and the thought of trying to track down every other girl on that list, knowing they’d probably have the same story . . .

  Maybe it didn’t matter, after all. Maybe it was enough that she was here, and he’d never hurt anyone again.

  Not that she was condoning murder . . .

  The chorus of “He Had It Coming” from that musical earwormed into her brain, and Ginny winced. Now she’d have that in her head all day.

  “Oh God. Poor—no, he deserved it. But—”

  There was the sound of a door squeaking open, and they all stilled, suddenly aware that they were discussing this in a semi-public place, but the footsteps echoed into the gym from the hallway, someone walking away. Ginny was worried that the interruption would make Kim freeze up again, but having decided to unburden herself, she was going to go all the way.

  “Yeah. Maybe I should, yeah, I should tell you, because maybe that explains—”

  She could see Tonica’s ears prick up, the way Penny’s did sometimes. “Explains what?”

  Kim took a deep breath, trying to settle herself, not at all weirded out by the fact that the until-now-quiet guy had asked the question. “I didn’t think anything about it at first, because, well, I didn’t notice, honestly. But when I got home that day, the day he . . . I emptied my bag out, because I was going to switch bags—I use one for school and one for after,” and Ginny nodded, although that was a level of teenager she didn’t remember at all, “and there was a thumb drive in there. I mean, who uses thumb drives anymore?”

  Ginny didn’t respond to that. Tonica, who probably still used Zip drives, wisely stayed quiet, too.

  “It was his, it had to be. I thought at first it must have fallen into my bag when he . . . But then I remembered something catching at my bag when I tried to leave the house, and I didn’t stop because I was just so glad to get out of there, but what if Jamie dropped it there when he saw the woman waiting for him? What if she wanted it, and when it wasn’t there, she killed him?�
��

  From the look on Tonica’s face, he thought the girl was reaching with that theory. Ginny couldn’t disagree, but she wasn’t going to dismiss the girl out of hand, either.

  “You’re sure it came from his house?” Tonica asked.

  She nodded. “It was silver, and I’d never seen it before, and that was the only place I could have gotten it.”

  “What was on it?”

  Kim shrugged, and wiped her nose on the back of her hand, then pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, to try to stop the tears that were still leaking, turning her eyes bloodshot. “I don’t know.”

  “You never plugged it in, tried to use it?” That, Ginny didn’t believe.

  The girl shrugged, as though Ginny had asked a stupid-adult question. “I did, and it was protected, password encryption something-or-other. And I . . . Then he was dead, and I didn’t really want to know? I guess.”

  “Fair enough,” Tonica said. “What did you do with it?”

  “I threw it in my drawer, figured maybe I’d need it someday, I don’t know. It felt good, knowing I had something of his, after what he tried to do, which is weird but—”

  “No, that makes perfect sense,” Ginny said. She got it: the guy’d made Kim feel weak, helpless. Having something of his, something that he’d maybe valued . . . It was a quiet, safe kind of payback.

  “But then after you came by I started to think maybe . . . something was going on. And maybe . . . maybe I should have given the drive to the cops?”

  “Ya think?” Tonica said, not quite quietly enough, and Kim flushed angrily. “All right, yeah. I was dumb. I get it. That’s . . . that’s why I agreed to meet you. I mean, in the real world, who cares about fake IDs? It’s no big deal. But the way you were talking, and that other woman who was asking questions, and all the cops, obviously something was going on.”

  Kim might be seventeen and oblivious, but she wasn’t dumb.

  “And let’s face it,” she went on. “Him being a creeper isn’t enough to get everyone so worried about him being dead. And the way you said he died . . . That’s someone who was pissed-off. Really pissed-off.”